IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - September 2021 - 6

PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE
BY DAVID KUNKEE
Focusing on IGARSS and Global Activities
A
bout this time, I expected to be returning from the
IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing
WE WILL BE EXPLORING
HOW TO BEST LEVERAGE
IN-PERSON AND VIRTUAL
ENVIRONMENTS FOR
IGARSS 2022, IN KUALA
LUMPUR, MALAYSIA.
Symposium (IGARSS) that was to be held in Brussels,
Belgium, with many stories about the trip and thinking
about discussions I had with colleagues. However, once
again, we found ourselves attending the conference online
and, in many cases, recording presentations that
originally were intended to be given live. The continued
threat of COVID-19 forced this necessity, which, however,
did enable many us to avoid the heavy rains and
flooding that swept through portions
of Belgium, The Netherlands,
and western Germany and resulted
in severe damage and lost lives.
While it was not a substitute for an
in-person event, having a virtual
meeting ensured that our presence
did not exacerbate the emergency. I
would like to take a moment to congratulate
Ramon Hansson, Joost
Vandenabeele, Michal Shimoni,
and the entire IGARSS 2021 local
organizing committee for their hard work and excellent
results. The key notes, morning special events, and lively
discussions made for a great experience and opportunity
to network.
At the IGARSS opening session, it was my pleasure
to recognize the 2021 IEEE Geoscience and Remote
Sensing Society (GRSS) Fellows-Jun Li, Zhao-Liang
Li, Xiuping Jia, Jeffrey Piepmeier, Xiao Xiang Zhu,
and Lizhe Wang-and announce four GRSS major
awards. Kung-Shun Chen received the 2021 GRSS
Fawwaz Ulaby Distinguished Achievement Award;
Adriano Camps received the GRSS Education Award;
Paolo Gamba received the GRSS Outstanding Service
Award; and Rafal Modrzewski received the GRSS Industry
Leader Award. Congratulations to our Fellows
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MGRS.2021.3104218
Date of current version: 28 September 2021
6
and award winners. For more about the awards ceremony,
please see the article by Alberto Moreira in
this issue.
The closing session at IGARSS was highlighted by
the GRSS Society Awards and Student Paper Competition
(SPC) award announcements. The SPC continued
a very successful trend of attracting many high-quality
contributions, this year with 239 submissions. Prior to
the symposium, 10 finalists were selected to give presentations
of their work to the SPC Committee, which
selected the winners of the three annual prizes: the
Mikio Takagi Student Paper Prize (first place), and the
second- and third-place awards. These were presented
during the closing session on Friday afternoon, which
also included the GRSS Image Analysis and Data Fusion
(IADF) Technical Committee's announcement of the
2021 Data Fusion Contest winners and the GRSS Best
Reviewers recognition.
Every year at IGARSS, the GRSS recognizes the best
reviewers from the previous year as recommended by
the associate editors and editors-in-chief of each journal.
This year, Antonio Plaza was also recognized for
his efforts as editor-in-chief of IEEE Journal on Miniaturization
for Air and Space Systems (JMASS), which is cosponsored
by the GRSS. His work resulted in an increase
in manuscript submissions and enabled many of the
recent journal volumes to be published. As a result, we
feel JMASS is well positioned to grow concurrently with
the importance of and contributions from small satellite
missions in remote sensing. We look forward to building
on his success.
Of note, for the past two IGARSS events that were held
online, there has been a record number of registrations.
There is little argument that the online experience is not
as satisfying and that, overall, it is limited compared to
meeting in person. Another perspective is that virtual
events enable many more people to attend and benefit
from the discussions and presentations. Furthermore,
one might say virtual meetings have been a great benefit
to a Society with members spread throughout the
IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER 2021
IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - September 2021

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